By Todd C. Elliott
A wife, a mother and a businesswoman walked into a coffee shop in downtown. It’s no joke, but if it were, the punchline it would be that the wife, the mother and the businesswoman are all Chelsea Gros Boudreaux, the owner of Stellar Beans, downtown Lake Charles’ premiere coffee place and eatery.
As a woman-owned business proprietor, Chelsea says she utilizes the nurturing skills she’s developed as a mother. Lately, she has been helping to nurture local artists and vendors by hosting a vendor’s market.
“The reason I got started with the vendor’s market is because normally every year we have the Spring Art Walk and the Gallery Promenade, and those were some of our busiest days at Stellar Beans,” said Chelsea. “And we, of course, support local here. I wanted people to have an outlet to be able to sell their homemade items or local art on the second Saturday of each month … we decided to start doing it out on the sidewalks, along with the other business owners on Broad Street and Ryan Street.”
Locals and visitors keen on visiting the Charlestown Farmers Market may have noticed that the downtown Lake Charles “Meet Me at the Market” event has evaporated from Saturday mornings at the old City Hall. City officials hinted that it may be due to the summer heat in Southwest Louisiana.
“We unfortunately cancelled our July and August Meet Me at the Market due to heat and availability,” stated Payton Dodds Lundmark, director of cultural affairs with the City of Lake Charles, in an email. “We will resume in September.”
By inviting folks to meet artists and vendors at Stellar Beans, it appears that Chelsea and her band of downtown business owners are helping to fill the void left by the City of Lake Charles.
Along with other downtown businesses, like Panorama Music House, Stellar Beans invites artists to proudly display original, local art for their designated month, and perhaps be chosen as “artist of the month.”
Chelsea is the “cool mom” to artists and artisans, who get offered a chance to hang on the walls at her place of business. She contributes not just to the growth and guidance of her perceived creative “children” but to the culture of SWLA itself.
Chelsea says that she had no idea that the city had suspended the Meet Me at the Market on Saturdays. When she started her vendors market three months ago, she didn’t view it as a competition between her market and the city’s. She did it because she cared.
“I’m an alternative, but I don’t want to take the city’s place, because with all the different avenues we can work together and generate more things for our locals,” she says. “And then, for people who live in the area and don’t venture out in downtown, now they have more of a reason to come to downtown Lake Charles to check it out. Because downtown is beautiful.”
However, the timing of Chelsea’s offering an alternative could not have been better. Her market can now benefit more artisans and artists than she originally might have imagined. Now, vendors who once paid for booth space on Bilbo Street can afford a free sidewalk market space on a more visible Broad Streeton the second Saturday of each month.
Multi-tasking, taking on more responsibility and growing a business requires the patience that only a mother can provide. Chelsea has been a woman in business for almost 30 years, beginning a real estate company with her husband when they were first married. She also owned the Yoga Center of Lake Charles from 2005 to 2021 and assumed ownership of Stellar Beans in 2017. Running these two businesses which were adjacent to one another provided some convenience. However, being a woman in business does not come without challenges.
“Certain vendors do not always want to work with a woman,” she said. “To me, that’s weird. Probably my biggest struggle is IT (Information Technology) data storage with computers and the POS (Point of Sale) network, entering new food and drink items and having them go to our kiosk and delivery places. Doing the back end of advertising and different things like that, that’s probably my biggest struggle.”
While sometimes it’s men or machines that Chelsea may clash with in the business realm, another battlefront is her competitive market against large corporations in the same coffee game as Stellar Beans. Chelsea wanted to compete against Starbuck’s Coffee without tasting like Starbuck’s Coffee. Staying innovative, she found a work-around to a better tasting coffee via yet another machine for her coffee roasting.
“You know how Starbuck’s coffee tends to have that bitter, burnt taste?” she says. “That’s because it is. We don’t use the kind of roasters that they do. We have a new air-roaster that tends to work like a popcorn maker without any burning of the beans and grounds.”
Chelsea likes to support organic coffee bean growers that also support women. She cites the Rwandan genocide in Africa as a catalyst for how and where she selects her coffee beans. She said that following the genocide, most all the Rwandan men and boys were killed leaving women behind who by law could not own land. Years later, the Rwandan women formed a co-op to work the land, harvesting and sorting coffee beans as part of the country’s largest export.
“When we get Rwandan beans, they are from the Rwandan women,” said Chelsea. “We get our beans from all over like Sumatra, Chiapas, Ethiopia, but we look for places that will help the farmers, all fair-trade and organic.”
Before she became the owner of Stellar Beans, her then-teenage son worked there as a barista. She says that before becoming a coffee shop owner, she didn’t know the difference between making a cappuccino and a latte. When she became the owner, she kept her son on as part of the present family business. He has trained his mother in the ways of stellar coffee beverages.
As a woman business owner, Chelsea sees the bigger picture like a family portrait. She envisions building Stellar Beans so that one day the business can be left to her family. Her goal is for her son to inherit a business with a strong business model and work ethic. Chelsea would also like to see more women, like herself, in business.
“For so long it’s been a man’s world,” says Chelsea. “But the world is big enough for everybody. And the creativity, the nurturing side, those are things that women can bring to business and community. I feel like sometimes, when you’re in the corporate world you tend to see a man in charge. Not always, but you tend to see a man, and the way that men carry themselves, in their demeanor, is different. A lot of times women are more compassionate and can help motivate and encourage employees and other people. My husband does all the back-end stuff. He calls me the face of the business. He’s quiet and tall. I’m short and talkative.”
Chelsea said that a major difference in being a yoga institute owner and a coffee shop owner is that when she was in the yoga business, people just performed what she instructed verbally. Being in the coffee industry requires more finesse and conversational interaction with her regular clients. She said that she worries about her “regulars” and checks on them when they don’t show up at Stellar Beans like clockwork to take their place, perched inside the comfort and aromatherapy of downtown’s favorite coffee hideaway.
When asked what drives a woman in business, Chelsea replied that money is not always the primary motivation.
“I mean, we want to make a profit, we want to be able to keep going, because we support several families here,” she said. “But we want to establish something that our son can take over for his family one day. And we want to maintain something that is a staple in Lake Charles. Basically, Stellar Beans can be Lake Charles’ living room.”
Chelsea received a humanitarian award and recognition from the state for their community-mindedness following the dark days post-Hurricanes Laura and Delta.
Learning the coffee industry, according to Chelsea, can be comparable to her perceiving the wants and needs of her own community. She said she started “learning the basics” when she took ownership of the established coffee shop. She learned how much was needed to make the shots that she was pulling, whether those shots were of espresso or, in the case of business risk, a shot at success. She learned how much she needed of everything to make a perfect blend and get-it brewing in downtown Lake Charles. She nurtured her business, shaping it as if it were her own child, around her hopes and expectations.
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